Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [10]
There are five flags, she explained. The yellow one is earth, the green is water, the red is fire—the one we must escape—and white is cloud, and blue is sky, limitless space or mind. Coop, I don’t know what to do. She was on his shoulders, in mid-air, looking into space.
Do you think Claire knows?
Claire talks to me every night, and I don’t say a word about you, and she must wonder why I don’t say a word about you.
Then Claire knows.
Some afternoons she spoke to him in an earnest schoolgirl French—as though she were not someone who had grown up alongside him, almost a sibling. Or she’d move away from his desire and read him a description of a city. Sometimes she snuggled against his brown shoulders and after making love burst into tears. There were times she needed this boy or man, whatever he was, to cry as well, to show he understood the extremity of what was happening between them. When he was in her, about to come, looking down on her, his passive face looked torn open, but still he was wordless. It was easier for him. He did not accompany her down to the farmhouse each evening and eat a meal with her father and sister, and play a game of whist during which she’d look up suddenly to see Claire staring at her, attempting to break into her privacy. They were long, maddening, sterile games of chance and counting and collecting pairs or runs, with her father keeping score obsessively. (Besides, Coop was the only one among them good at cards. There were games in the past, Anna remembered, when he would sit laughing at their incompetence.) Worst of all, she had to sleep in the bed next to Claire in mutual silence.
Then Claire knows.
Had Coop loved anyone else? Did you love anyone else? she asked. He was shy at first. Then he said, ‘A woman in Tulare.’ Tell me about her. ‘No.’ Tell—. ‘No.’ What am I like compared to her? ‘It was just one night I slept with her.’ Ah good, you slept. She kissed him on his doubtful face, then dressed and walked down the hill alone. Halfway home she approached tears, but refused them. She tried to imagine sleeping with anybody else. No one could ever know her as well as Coop did. No one knew Coop as well as she did. She felt this gave her some power, in her walk down to her other life. She was sixteen years old. Almost nothing.
Anna went into Rex’s Hardware in Petaluma and bought a can of blue paint, a specific blue to match the blue on one of the flags, and lugged it uphill to the cabin. Coop brought his table out onto the deck. She eased the top off the can and stirred the paint. The weather was strange that day, the heat interrupted by gusts of wind, and they watched the flags bucking, almost breaking loose. Anna remembers every detail. She wound up the gramophone for music. They waited to make love. She sanded down the wood while conjugating French verbs out loud and then began painting the table. All that colourless wood in the cabin had driven her mad, and this blue was a gift for Coop. The wind died suddenly into silence and she looked up. The sky was a dark green, the clouds turbulent like oil.
Thunder exploded over the deck while they were lying there, holding on to each other, as if it had come down a funnel onto their nakedness. They didn’t dare let go. It felt to Anna that whatever was in each of them had leapt out into the body of the other. That she’d replaced her heart with Coop’s. She could hear nothing, the thunder crash still in her ears. She was trembling in his arms. Then she saw a hand come forward out of nowhere and grip the hair on Coop’s head and pull it back, pull him off her, so that she saw sky for a moment and then her father’s head looking down at her.
He had ridden up to the cabin to warn the boy of a storm, a possible tornado, had slipped off his quarter horse that was shying under the claps of thunder, and walked round the cabin onto the deck. It was not embarrassment that